On July 4th, CERN scientists announced that they
observed a particle that strongly resembles the Higgs boson, a critical element
of the standard model of particle physics.This particle is thought to be responsible for the characteristic of
mass, which gives objects weight when combined with gravity.

Detection of the Higgs Boson would not have been possible
without the last decade’s advances in processing big data.Joe Incandela, CMS Spokesman at CERN,
explained that if every collision that they scanned was a sand grain, these
sand grains would have filled up an Olympic sized pool over the last 2
years.They had to find the several
dozen or so grains of sand that exhibited characteristics consistent with the
Higgs Boson.

In addition to developing the Large Hadron Collider, the
CERN teams also developed a data strategy to deal with the data from the
hundreds of millions of particle collisions occurring each second.The sensors record the raw data on billions
of events occurring in the proton collider. These readings are then reconstructed
to show the energy and directions of many particle traces.The data goes through 2 stages of filtering
to reduce the data on 40 million collisions/sec down to 10 million interesting
ones per second, and then to 100 or 200 collisions that are studied in
depth.

According to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general at CERN, “The
computing power and network is a very important part of the research.”Over
15 Petabytes (1 million Gigabytes) are stored each year.This is distributed through the Worldwide
Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (WLCG) to each of 11 major Tier 1 centers
around the world, and from there to research centers and individual
scientists.In the U.S., the Open
Science Grid, supported by NSF and DOE, provides much of the compute and
storage power for this work.The
scientists use Monte Carlo simulations for
generating and propagating the physics interactions of the elementary particles
passing through the collider to determine which ones correspond to the
hypothesized behavior of the Higgs Boson.

What they found was a never seen before elementary particle
that seems to fit the behavior of the Higgs Boson and is very heavy –
approximately 133 proton masses.Further
data analysis is now needed to ascertain its spin, decay modes, and other
characteristics.

Think the amount of data generated by the Large Hadron
Collider is huge?The forthcoming Square
Kilometre Array radio telescope is expected to generate 100’s of Petabytes of
data per day.More on that in a future
blog post.